Main Menu
- Welcome to SayIT.
- Log in
We have just reviewed the top liquid-cooling products from Corsair. Today time has come to check out another system, which is one step below the flagship solution in the positioning charts.
Corsair started their enclosure business from the top of the market and worked their way down. Their first case was an expensive black monolith, the Obsidian 800D, popular for watercooling setups but less so for air. They fired a shrink ray at it and came up with the Obsidian 700D, roughly $50 less. It wasn't until the Graphite 600T that they produced a case with an enthusiast pricetag but also a design that deviated from the Obsidian standard; we were very happy with the 600T in our review back in December. That case proved to be a real success for Corsair; so many of its design cues were married to the design of the Obsidian series, and the net result was the even less expensive Obsidian 650D. Yet Corsair still hasn't tackled the sub-$100 market...until now.
What makes the Carbide 400R particularly interesting is that it's Corsair's first positive pressure case design. Not just that, but in many ways it's simultaneously their most advanced design despite being their least expensive.
he more I examined the Carbide 400R, the more I felt like Corsair was "advancing in reverse." Each new release of theirs is just a little more innovative than its predecessor, and with the 400R we see a lot of features that frankly we'd like to see scale up the chain. Mercifully, though, the extremely flexible system for fans coupled with the increased real estate behind the motherboard tray, LED toggle, and USB 3.0 motherboard header cable are launching at the low $99 price point. That's a straight up win for the consumer: Corsair's first $99 enclosure is also one of its most advanced.
The last time we checked out an NZXT enclosure, we saw in their H2 a lot of fantastic ideas done in by a single poor design choice. NZXT's engineers are clearly thinking on their feet and the company stays in the enclosure conversation with good reason, and today we have on the slab their new Tempest 410 Elite mid-tower. Geared towards excellent performance without breaking the bank (remember when that was what overclocking was about?), should the Tempest 410 Elite be on your shortlist for an economical build, or were too many compromises made ?
Today we are going to talk about three new models in the flagship Seasonic X Gold series, and about three more PSUs for compact FlexATX, SFX and TFX system cases.
For our new system case review we selected three models from the upper mainstream price segment, which we haven’t had a chance to check out previously. Which one of these products will turn out the most appealing considering that they all are priced very similarly?
The long-anticipated liquid-cooling system has finally made it to our lab. Let’s find out if it will prove up to our expectations!
<p><span style="font-size: small;">Most enthusiasts are familiar with Rosewill as a brand of inexpensive parts of decent quality. They've had enclosures on the market for ages, but those cases are almost always for budget builds. But today we have something that you may not be prepared for: an enthusiast-class full tower enclosure, competitively priced but clearly not for just any build. Rosewill's beast is able to support the largest of ATX motherboards and can handle quad-SLI and quad-Crossfire rigs with room to spare. In a market of SilverStones, Antecs, Corsairs, and Lian Lis, should you be giving Rosewill another look ?<br />
</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: small;">I'll be candid: I wasn't expecting a case like this from Rosewill. This thing is a monster, clearly designed with performance in mind, and priced that way. The plastic and steel build is actually remarkably staid, while connectivity is among the best of breed. It's not a bad looking case at all, and from just glancing at the specifications, the Thor v2 looks like it may have what it takes to perform with the best of them.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: small;">In addition to the staggering amount of expansion space within the Thor v2, the front 230mm fan glows red, a feature you can toggle on and off using a recessed button on the face. The fan controllers also support up to three fans per channel for six total. What perplexed me from the get-go was the venting on the top, though: there's a slider switch you can use to open or close the top vents, which seems like a cool idea until you realize that with those vents closed, there's nowhere for the top exhaust fan to channel air. Just from a cursory examination, though, it seems like airflow should be the last of the Thor v2's problems.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: small;"><a target="_blank" href="http://www.anandtech.com/show/4648/rosewill-thor-v2-the-god-of-cooling-and-silence">Read more...</a><br />
</span></p>
Many graphics card owners dream about a compact, lightweight cooler that would only block one PCI slot on their mainboard. And ZEROtherm Company is ready to offer them one. Our today’s article will help you learn how efficient and nosy the new VGA cooler from ZEROtherm is.
We are going to talk about a very promising new CPU cooler from ARCTIC, which, unfortunately, didn’t live up to our expectations.
Ever since we reviewed the SilverStone Raven RV03, a lot of you have chimed in about their Fortress FT02 enclosure, with more than one even proclaiming it the best air-cooling enclosure ever; high praise to be sure. To be fair, we were impressed with the FT02 when we reviewed the DigitalStorm BlackOps, a monster of a boutique build that nonetheless ran remarkably quiet and cool given the massive overclock on its Core i7-950 and the pair of GeForce GTX 580s sandwiched together in precisely the way NVIDIA tells you to avoid. It didn't matter: the system was cool and quiet despite pulling nearly 700 watts under our testing load and undoubtedly capable of pulling more. The FT02 has been around for a couple of years now and SilverStone warns that it doesn't enjoy some of the conveniences modern enclosures do, but can it hold up ?